It’s prime running season. It’s warm enough for bare arms and the faint beginnings of a sports bra tan, but cool enough for a brisk breeze whipped like egg whites around whisked ankles.

More than half of my writing begins while I’m running. It’s not intentional — it just happens. It’s like getting my feet off the ground lets my head float a little higher in the clouds, where the lofty ideas are easier to reach.

I usually head west from my Williamsburg apartment, then jut to the right when I hit the waterfront, weaving in and out of the coastal parks. Across the river, the Manhattan skyline bursts up like a magnificent geode, the shiny combs of buildings crowded together, glimmering, small enough to seem graspable. While I feel like I’m flying, that view reminds me of rooted gravity; while I feel infinite and invincible, it reminds me that I am so very tiny, and so very vincible.

I typically finish with a few loops around the track at Greenpoint’s McCarren Park. As I’m losing steam, I like surrounding myself with other panting people — fellow runners, racing circles around groups of kids playing soccer on the field in the center. Some jog slowly, chatting with friends, fanny-packs bouncing. Others stretch on the sidelines or do sweaty sets of sit-ups and push-ups. On the benches, elderly Brooklynites prop up their canes to rest their weary legs, tilting raisin faces towards the sun. There’s a persistent airy pop of tennis balls bouncing on the courts just a few feet away.

“One more lap,” I was reciting silently to myself on an evening earlier this week, as I prepared to quit. One — huff — more — pant — lap — puff. I slowed and turned my head towards the playground equipment, where I spotted a stranger doing pull-ups from the monkey bars.

His arms must have been thicker than my thighs, carved as stone, strong — sweat dripping, hands gripping. I would never have guessed, if I’d only seen him upward of his chiseled abs, that he was a double amputee. But he was — both of his legs ended at his knees. Next to him, a wheelchair waited while he pulsed resolutely up and down, showing no signs of stopping.

Our culture is obsessed with advice: how to exercise, how to eat, how to hustle, how to relax. The listicle-rich realm of online media is cacophonous with attention-grabbing gabbing that’s glorified as guidance, and it pelts us perpetually with its tokens of “wisdom.” Social media, meanwhile, is a mecca of motivational mantras, piled on top of one another in heaps of contradictions. Just do it — but just be! Lean in — but let it go!

To integrate all of the instructions into everyday life would be a preposterous task, if not entirely impossible, as this piece by Sara Kloek so aptly illuminates. If you try to collect every shiny “wisdom” token, you’ll collapse under the weight. And you’ll find, too, that few are solid gold; more are plastic, spray-painted silver.

But the real problem with this obsessive offering of answers to life’s tough questions isn’t just the overload. It’s not just the confusion, or the inauthenticity, or even the inaccuracy.

It’s the strain it puts on everyone’s self-worth.

When you can’t seem to adhere to the advice, to do what you’re supposed to do if you want to be happy and healthy and successful and loved, you feel like something is wrong with you.

But sometimes, Nike be damned, you JUST CAN’T DO IT. You might be tired or distracted or scared. You might not be ready yet.

Sometimes, you might do the exact opposite of the “right thing.” Sometimes that “right thing” is forgiving yourself for doing the “wrong thing,” and somehow, you can’t even seem to do THAT.

Life gets harder, not easier, when you let too many other people tell you how to live it. A yearning for insight makes you vulnerable to taking too many stories as truth, instead of carefully selecting the ones that really resonate with who you are and what you need.